A silent witness
still, considerably under an hour. Yet, in that brief and leisurely
journey, one exchanged the grim sordidness of a most unlovely street
for the solitude and sweet rusticity of open and charming country.
A day or two after my second adventure in the mineral water works, I
was leaning on the parapet of the viaduct--the handsome, red brick
viaduct with which some builder, unknown to me, had spanned the pond
beyond the Upper Heath, apparently with purely decorative motive, and
in a spirit of sheer philanthropy. For no road seemed to lead anywhere
in particular over it, and there was no reason why any wayfarer should
wish to cross the pond rather than walk round it; indeed, in those
days it was covered by a turfy expanse seldom trodden by any feet but
those of the sheep that grazed in the meadows bordering the pond. I
leaned on the parapet, smoking my pipe with deep contentment, and
looking down into the placid water. Flags and rushes grew at its
borders, water-lilies spread their flat leaves on its surface and a
small party of urchins angled from the margin, with the keen joy of
the juvenile sportsman who suspects that his proceedings are unlawful.
I had lounged on the parapet for several minutes, when I became aware
of a man, approaching along the indistinct track that crossed the
viaduct, and, as he drew near, I recognized him as the keeper whom I
had met in Ken Wood on the morning after my discovery of the body in
Millfield Lane. I would have let him pass with a smile of recognition,
but he had no intention of passing. Touching his hat politely, he
halted, and, having wished me good-morning, remarked:
“You didn’t tell me, sir, what it was you were looking for that
morning when I met you in the wood.”
“No,” I replied, “but apparently, someone else has.”
“Well, sir, you see,” he said, “the sergeant came up the next day with
a plain-clothes man to have a look round, and, as the sergeant is an
old acquaintance of mine, he gave me the tip as to what they were
after. I am sorry, sir, you didn’t tell me what you were looking for.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well,” he replied, “we might have found something if we had looked
while the tracks were fresh. Unfortunately there was a gale in the
night that fetched down a lot of leaves, and blew up those that had
already fallen, so that any foot-marks would have got hidden before
the sergeant came.”
“What did the police officers seem to think about it?” I asked.
“Why, to speak the truth,” the keeper replied, “they seemed to think
it was all bogey.”
“Do you mean to say,” I asked, “that they thought I had invented the
whole story?”
“Oh, no, sir,” he replied, “not that. They believed you had seen a man
lying in the lane, but they didn’t believe that he was a dead man, and
they thought your imagination had misled you about the tracks.”
“Then, I suppose they didn’t find anything?” said I.
“No, they didn’t, and I haven’t been able to find anything myself,
though I’ve had a good look round.” And then, after a brief pause: “I
wonder,” he said, “if you would care to come up to the Wood and have a
look at the place yourself.”
I considered for a moment. I had nothing to do for I was taking a day
off, and the man’s proposal sounded rather attractive. Finally, I
accepted his offer, and we turned back together towards the Wood.
Hampstead--the Hampstead of those days--was singularly rustic and
remote. But, within the wood, it was incredible that the town of
London actually lay within the sound of a church bell or the flight of
a bullet. Along the shady paths, carpeted with moss and silvery
lichen, overshadowed by the boughs of noble beeches; or in leafy
hollows, with the humus of centuries under our feet, and the
whispering silence of the woodland all around, we might have been
treading the glades of some primeval forest. Nor was the effect of
this strange remoteness less, when presently, emerging from the
thicker portion of the wood, we came upon a moss-grown, half-ruinous
boathouse on the sedgy margin of a lake, in which was drawn up a
rustic-looking, and evidently, little-used punt.
“It’s wonderful quiet about here, sir,” the keeper remarked, as a
water-hen stole out from behind a clump of high rushes and scrambled
over the leaves of the water-lilies.
“And presumably,” I remarked, “it’s quieter still at night.”
“You’re right, sir,” the keeper replied. “If that man had got as far
as this, he’d have had mighty little trouble in putting the body where
no one was ever likely to look for it.”
“I suppose,” said I, “that you had a good look at the edges of the
lake?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I went right round it, and so did the police, for
that matter, and we had a good look at the punt, too. But, all the
same, it wouldn’t surprise me if, one fine day, that body came
floating up among the lilies; always supposing, that is,” he added,
“that there really was a body.”
“How far is it,” I asked, “from the lake to the place where you met me
that morning?”
“It’s only a matter of two or three minutes,” he answered, “we may as
well walk that way and you can see for yourself.” Accordingly, we set
forth together, and, coming presently upon one of the moss-grown
paths, followed it past a large summerhouse until we came in sight of
the beech beyond which I had encountered him while I was searching for
the tracks. As we went, he plied me with questions as to what I had
seen on the night in the lane, and I made no scruple of telling him
all that I had told the police, seeing that they, on their side, had
made no secret of the matter.
Of course, it was idle, after this long period--for it was now more
than seven weeks since I had seen the body--to attempt anything in the
nature of a search. It certainly did look as if the man who had stolen
into that wood that night had been bound for the solitary lake. The
punt, I had noticed, was only secured with a rope, so that the
murderer--for such I assumed he must have been--could easily have
carried his dreadful burden out into the middle, and there sunk it
with weights, and so hidden it for ever. It was a quick, simple and
easy method of hiding the traces of his crime, and, if the police had
not thought it worth while to search the water with drags, there was
no reason why the buried secret should not remain buried for all time.
After we had walked for some time about the pleasant, shady wood, less
shady now that the yellowing leaves were beginning to fall with the
passing of autumn, the keeper conducted me to the exit by which I had
left on the previous occasion.
As I was passing out of the wicket, my eye fell once more on the
cottage which I had then noticed, and, recalling the remark that my
fair acquaintance had let fall concerning the artist to whom the
derelict knife was supposed to belong, I said: “You mentioned, I
think, that that house was let to an artist.”
“It was,” he replied; “but it’s empty now, the artist has gone away.”
“It must be a pleasant little house to live in,” I said, “at any rate,
in summer.”
“Yes,” he replied, “a country house within an hour’s walk of the Bank
of England. Would you like to have a look at it, sir? I’ve got the
keys.”
Now I certainly had no intention of offering myself as a tenant, but,
yet, to an idle man, there is a certain attractiveness in an empty
house of an eligible kind, a certain interest in roaming through the
rooms and letting one’s fancy furnish them with one’s own household
goods. I accepted the man’s invitation, and, opening the wide gate
that admitted to the garden from a byroad, we walked up to the door of
the house.
“It’s quite a nice little place,” the keeper remarked. “There isn’t
much garden, you see, but then, you’ve got the Heath all around; and
there’s a small stable and coachhouse if you should be wanting to go
into town.”
“Did the last tenant keep any kind of carriage?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” said the keeper, “but I fancy he used to hire a
little cart sometimes when he had things to bring in from town; but I
don’t know very much about him or his habits.”
We walked through the empty rooms together looking out of the windows
and commenting on the pleasant prospects that all of them commanded,
and talking about the man who had last lived in the house.
“He was a queer sort of fellow,” said the keeper. “He and his wife
seem to have lived here all alone without any servant, and they seem
often to have left the house to itself for a day or two at a time; but
he could paint. I have stopped and had a look when he has been at
work, and it was wonderful to see how he knocked off those pictures.
He didn’t seem to use brushes, but he had a lot of knives, like little
trowels, and he used to shovel the paint on with them, and he always
wore gloves when he was painting; didn’t like to get the paint on his
hands, I suppose.”
“It sounds as if it would be very awkward,” I said.
“Just what I should have thought,” the keeper agreed. “But he didn’t
seem to find it so. This seems to be the place that he worked in.”
Apparently the keeper was right. The room, which we had now entered,
was evidently the late studio, and did not appear to have been cleaned
up since the tenant left. The floor was littered with scraps of paper
on which a palette-knife had been cleaned, with empty paint-tubes and
one or two broken and worn-out brushes, and, in a packing-case, which
seemed to have served as a receptacle for rubbish, were one or two
canvases that had been torn from their stretchers and thrown away. I
picked them out and glanced at them with some interest, remembering
what my fair friend had said. For the most part, they were mere
experiments or failures, deliberately defaced with strokes or daubs of
paint, but one of them was a quite spirited and attractive sketch,
rough and unfinished, but skilfully executed and undefaced. I
stretched out the crumpled canvas and looked at it with considerable
interest. It represented Millfield Lane, and showed the large elms and
the posts and the high fence under which I had sheltered in the rain.
In fact, it appeared to have been taken from the exact spot on which
the body had been lying, and from which I had made my own drawing; not
that there was anything in the latter coincidence, for it was the only
sketchable spot in the lane.
“It’s really quite a nice sketch,” I said; “it seems a pity to leave
it here among the rubbish.”
“It does, sir,” the keeper agreed. “If you like it, you had better
roll it up and put it in your pocket. You won’t be robbing anyone.”
As it seemed that I was but rescuing it from a rubbish-heap, I
ventured to follow the keeper’s advice, and, rolling the canvas up,
carefully stowed it in my pocket. And shortly after as I had now seen
all that there was to see, which was mighty little, we left the house,
and, at the gate, the keeper took leave of me with a touch of his hat.
I made my way slowly back towards my lodgings by way of the Spaniard’s
Road and Hampstead Lane, turning over in my mind as I went, the
speculation suggested by my visit to the wood. Of the existence of the
lake I had not been previously aware. Now that I had seen it, I felt
very little doubt that it was known to the mysterious murderer--for
such I felt convinced he was--who must have been lurking in the lane
that night when I was sheltering under the lee of the fence. The route
that he had then taken appeared to be the direct route to the lake.
That he was carrying the body, I had no doubt whatever; and, seeing
that he had carried it so far, it appeared probable that he had some
definite hiding-place in view. And what hiding-place could be so
suitable as this remote piece of still water? No digging, no
troublesome and dangerous preparation would be necessary. There was